EXTENDED SUPPLY LINES

the 24,000 U.S. troops who are stationed in Afghanistan would likely run out of fuel within a matter of days.

The U.S. military is now burning about 575,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan.

• 80 percent of that fuel is coming from refineries in Pakistan.

• only one other fuel supply line that extends more than 1,000 miles from northern Afghanistan to refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan. Fuel from the refinery in Baku is loaded on rail cars, put on barges that then traverse the Caspian Sea. When they land in Turkmenistan, they follow a circuitous rail route through Uzbekistan before they arrive at the Afghan border where the fuel is then transferred to trucks.

The long supply lines to the Caspian Sea underscore the importance of the Pakistani fuel.

Some 700 tanker trucks were being used to deliver the fuel and some of the trucks were taking a month or more to make a round trip delivery from their starting points in Pakistan. On some occasions, the U.S. military had as much as 4.7 million gallons of motor fuel in transit between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In addition to the sheer volume of fuel, Jennings and his team were dealing with pilferage, accidents, trucker strikes and cultural barriers.

By mid-2006, the total fuel storage capacity for forces operating out of the air bases at Kabul and Bagram was less than 3 million gallons. Although a contractor working for the U.S. military is now building an additional 3 million gallons of storage capacity at Bagram Air Base,